[jasonwatkinspdx]

Automated gem cutting exists, but is only used for lower value stones. If it were such an obvious slam dunk the industry would be using it for stones like this too.

I like to use Toyota as an example, because they famously reject total automation as a desirable goal. The believe having humans in the loop creates a learning loop that gets the best overall result, so they optimize for a sweet spot between automation and human.

To use an analogy from art, automation doesn't replace the artist, it replaces more limited paint brushes. As amazing as recent large model advances are, there's also a clear difference in how effective humans are at using them to get the desired result.

If you're just playing around then a simple prompt to finished image pipeline is convenient and shockingly good. If you're being more specific about the end goal then you need the model to expose more fine grained ways for the user to express what they want and modify the intermediate results. This why you see Adobe et all focusing on that kind of "smarter tool used in detail" approach.

[NikolaNovak]

>>If it were such an obvious slam dunk the industry would be using it for stones like this too.

I don't think so, or at least I think it misses where this industry drives value from. I don't know if my comment will seem too cynical for the Hacker News add value to discussion threshold, but - the entire industry is by definition built, completely, around sub-optimization and artificial complexity, scarcity, and meaning. If you want optimal and efficient and automated, you can get it for fraction of the price. The hand made sub-optimal facet is a strong part of the perceived / advertised value.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Yes, because simultaneously it's somehow true that it's a slam dunk to use automation to replace this skill, but yet industry faces some sort of irrational barriers to implement that.

Or maybe, just possibly, armchair opinions from programmers who have never done this and have no idea what the reality is beyond a youtube video have superficial understanding?

Which do you think is more likely?

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

A cheap quartz movement (watch mechanism) will be more accurate than most high-end mechanical watches, and yet they keep being made.

I think the main reasons (beside "vanity") are:

a) huge profit margins, limiting the incentive to optimize

b) high start up costs combined with relatively little volume

A system would have to accurately measure imperfections/inclusions, then pick the best design, then it'd either have to cut it themselves or communicate the instructions to the person (who'd have to be willing to use such a system).

The current approach with a human designing and cutting the stone is simply good enough, so there is no reason to change. And something like re-cutting the Koh-i-noor happens rarely enough that I suspect nobody wants to invest in developing the software for it when you can get a close enough result by throwing more one-off manual work at the problem.

Synthetic stones (which I assume are a much simpler problem because they're even cheaper and have fewer inclusions to optimize around) are already being cut by robots (or so I've been told, at least). I think the whole "real natural stone" and "hand-cut" parts are definitely part of the appeal/selling point.

If you care about a "slam dunk", you'll buy robot-cut Cubic Zirconia or Moissanite and call it a day.

[NikolaNovak]

I have absolutely not posited the barriers as "irrational". Artificial market segmentation, and increasing value of product through human artistry are increasingly common and not necessarily "irrational". There are any number of products on the market that machine can make better, but we value more highly when it's made by human... in fact, that's true of a very large proportion of products, marketed as "handcrafted" or, since it's 2024, "artisanal and rustic" et cetera :-)

(the line of where "handcrafted" goes from "friendly and community and positive and encouraging neighbourhood entrepreneurs" to "evil and scheming and big-corpo-deceptive" is subjective evaluation, but none of them necessitate "irrational" let alone, as is implied, "stupid")

[dylan604]

Anytime something takes a long time to create, there's an expected add to the price. Look at your 18 year old (and older) Scotch/Whiskey prices. Even lab grown gems takes months to "grow". Yes, there is a cartel influence on an artificial scarcity, but even still, it's something that isn't just common everyday discoveries for the vast majority of people. Even without the cartel influence, there would still be value in them vs much more common things like quartz/granite/etc.